[p-e-w]

The difference between today and 30 years ago is that if you are an individual developer, you are at the complete mercy of a single company (Valve), who can force you to do essentially anything they want for the privilege of publishing on their platform, with no meaningful alternative, and zero recourse if they say “no”.

[HugoTea]

Even if Valve holds a significant market share of the PC Gaming market, this is a harsh conclusion. There are other significantly more expensive and restrictive options, such as the Windows Store for Windows, or the Play Store for Android, or the App Store for iOS and MacOS. PC has much free-er and more accessible options for indie developers, like itch.io. It's probably the least monopolistic gaming market out there. The struggle of course is advertising and reach, not sure who the gate keepers for that were with TTD, maybe magazines?

[embedding-shape]

> with no meaningful alternative

Steam (which I'm guessing you're talking about) is nowhere close of being a monopoly. There are loads of alternatives out there, in wide use by people already. World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Minecraft, Roblox and more are all examples of big time successful games that never been available on Steam.

[LadyCailin]

I would even go further, and say that this logic applies not just for massive games from massive publishers, but platforms like GoG works well as an alternative for indies.

[simoncion]

Plus, consider the software distribution situation in the pre-Internet world. There was getting someone to arrange for very-limited-time distribution in physical stores (and paying out the ass for the privilege), or paying to advertise your mail-order distribution, or encouraging BBS operators to distribute your shareware that includes a "Mail $AMOUNT to this address and we'll mail you a full copy." message inside.

Of those options, the BBS one is probably the lowest cost, but -"shockingly"- that option is still available today... and is probably way easier for people to find your software than it was back in the day.

There are astroturfers out there who pretend that Steam is The Worst Thing Ever, but they distribute your game, dev-selected old (and pre-release) versions of your game, promotional materials for your game, and host forums and a news feed... forever. Valve also pretty clearly chooses to distribute games that are in the intersection of what's legal to distribute in the US and what the busybodies at MasterCard and Visa permit them to distribute.

If we lived in a just world, because of MasterCard's and Visa's enormous size, they'd be declared as something like "payment processors of last resort" and required to process transactions for anything that's legal to sell in the US, and subject to enormous fines if they so much as suggest to any merchant that MC/Visa will stop processing that merchant's payments for any reason other than a clear and obvious history of fraud.

Alas.

[bmitc]

Steam has a 75% share of the PC gaming market. The mere existence of alternatives doesn't negate a monopoly. Whether it's a monopoly or not depends on whether Valve uses its market power in a pathological way.

[mrguyorama]

Both Itch.io and GOG are alternative platforms, as is just doing your own thing

Many games I own started their life distributed exclusively through a platform other than steam.

Arguably, you don't even want to approach steam distribution until you've already collected your hype. Steam no longer can surface gems, because it's just far too flooded, so you should seek alternative channels in general.

[simoncion]

> Steam no longer can surface gems, because it's just far too flooded...

This hasn't been my experience. I've found that running the "Discovery Queue" a few times once or twice a week brings up an interesting game or two every month. It also brings up a bunch of stuff I'm not interested in, but that's the nature of game development... what you make isn't going to be particularly interesting to most folks.

There's also the "Show me a random game" link, which is fun to hit and see what crap it presents you. [0]

[0] <https://store.steampowered.com/explore/random/>

[parineum]

https://www.factorio.com/buy

[mh-]

I don't follow gaming news closely. Are there examples of this being a problem that I can read about?

[inigyou]

It's 100% possible to publish a game outside of Steam. There used to be a publicity advantage to being on Steam but is that still there now that Steam is 99% slop?

There are successful indie games that only entered Steam late in their lives.